Conservatives complain that government metastasizes like cancer. Programs create new demands for services even as problems grow. This critique hardly fits such popular and effective programs as Head Start or Social Security, marked by low administrative costs and demonstrated track records. Yet the familiar rant does describe one government program, the drug war.

Even in a climate resistant to taxes, Hancock County residents are contemplating the unthinkable – tax increases to fund a police drug-control task force. Some worry that drug treatment will be slighted, but almost everyone seems convinced that police efforts against drugs are a good first step. Yet if this initiative follows the usual model, it will increase both public health and social problems.

Drug wars have a bleak history. Movements to ban alcohol go back to the 19th century. Business leaders, often striving to force longer working hours on their immigrant employees, sought to ban the drinking associated with holidays and leisure hours. Rather than job safety, their primary concern was ensuring a world of work without end. Maine became the first state in the nation to ban alcohol in 1851.

Former drug czar Bill Bennett has argued that Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption. Evidence on that is mixed. Prohibition’s most lasting contribution was to increase crime and fund the Mafia. Crime was then cited as further reason to ban alcohol.

Current initiatives began with Nixon administration effort to explain and redress growing opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the mainstream culture of work and consumption. In the years since Nixon, the drug war has morphed into broad efforts to interdict supplies of drugs, to “educate” the public, and to punish both users and suppliers.

Even the least-controversial efforts have not only failed, they have also often been counterproductive. University of Maine economist Mel Burke points out that in 1962 when opium plantations in Mexico were destroyed, production moved to Colombia. When marijuana in Colombia was destroyed in 1987, production migrated to Mexico and the United States. Not surprisingly, when extensive efforts to stamp out marijuana were combined with exaggerated and distorted messages on marijuana, drug dealers pushed cocaine, a substance both more dangerous and harder to interdict.

Burke points out that the drug wars have been accompanied by growing consumption and lower prices for targeted drugs, exactly contrary to the expectation of the drug warriors. That war now consumes over $35 billion in government spending and producing the highest per-capita prison population in the world.

It is hard to imagine a more clear- cut example of big government failure. Why aren’t conservatives up in arms? Unfortunately, the drug war is not about public health, though health arguments are invoked in that war. Both Burke and University of Southern Maine professor David Wagner (Author of “The New Temperance”) point out that drug wars focus on the particular drugs and lifestyles of those who were dissenters against mainstream politics or presented alternatives to conventional mores. These wars are often the harshest when mainstream institutions are in greatest turmoil or are failing to deliver the goods even in their own terms.

Throughout our history, those groups that have been considered outside the mainstream have been disproportionately targeted for drug surveillance. Drugs associated in the popular mind with those groups have been the most heavily penalized. It is not accidental that crack – a favorite of some inner city African Americans – and powder cocaine – the choice of many stockbrokers – have been treated differently.

Groups associated with challenges to mainstream values can also be portrayed as more threatening to the extent they are connected with the consumption of drugs pictured as dangerous. And the danger of the drugs in turn is in part conveyed by reference to who uses the drugs. Thus in the 19th century, the American Psychiatric Association described marijuana as a primary stimulant to homosexual behavior, thus tarring with one brush both the drug and the sexual behavior.

Bill Bennett argues that since the American people accept alcohol, we should not return to prohibition. Nonetheless, because alcohol and drugs do, he admits, cause deaths, we should continue to ban “drugs.” But Bennett lets the rabbit out of the hat here. Alcohol is also a drug. The decision to ban mind-altering substances isn’t and never has been a public health issue. It is another part of ongoing cultural wars.

Mind-altering drugs will be part of any society. If our goal is to limit their damage, presenting honest information about risks and benefits, banning advertising of these substances, and providing ample resources for treatment of addicts would be our priorities. Punishment is appropriate when incapacitation – for drugs or other behaviors – causes death or injury to others.

Part and parcel of such an orientation is accepting – indeed celebrating – a world with more free time and growing openness to social, cultural, and ethnic difference. We are far from that world and so our drug wars drag on.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.